Barely Viable Product anyone?

After a gruelling exercise, I have reworked the MVP into a ‘multi-part BVP’… I shall explain.

First, I defined a new release version for Dominium, v0.5.0 – Episode 0, Barely Viable Product, which is as follows;

Barely Viable Product

Razor : Does it need to be implemented, in order to deliver something?

Fly around galaxy

Shoot stuff

Get shot at

Buy goods

Sell goods

Buy equipment/upgrades/repairs

A ‘razor’ is used to make a cutting decision – it either stays in, or it is cut out by judging it against the razor. A trick I was exposed to during my days at EA. Ok, so this particular razor may seem quite vague to Joe Public, but to me it’s sufficient to define ‘really, seriously, do you need ‘Feature X’ just to get something up and running?’

I then went through all the current MVP issues in Redmine, and moved them to the BVP using that razor.

Interestingly, it roughly cut the total time (2,861h) in half. (Nb. some issues have changed since the previous post).

And that’s now being as harsh as I can be. Removing any more will mean losing core gameplay features/mechanics that are essential (IMHO) to even a Barely Viable Product. It does prove the first pass was fairly accurate. Or perhaps it proves I really can’t let go of some things 🙂

So, my roadmap is now clearly defined. Although things will crop up, move around and even occur as I go forward, they will all be judged against the razor above, and go into the appropriate version.

My aim is to plough headlong into v0.5.0 Episode 0 – Barely Viable Product, and deliver something that can at least ‘be played’. Maybe that should be ‘Barely Playable Product’!

I’ll update the public Trello board with this in mind, once this has all settled down in my head.